Agenda’s and The Magic of Your Handwriting

Recently one of my Instagram followers DMed me for advice in response to my story post that said, “I’m a good example of balance, I won’t neglect my social life and won’t jeopardize my career”. You see, they both are equally important to me. My career provides me with the comforts of life, and my free time allows me to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Both are important—however, one more so than the other. This post will explain what I’ve used in the last year to organize my life in such a way that allowed me to have fun while checking things off my daily to-do-list–which ultimately turned into huge life-changing gains.

Accomplishing goals for myself has never been an issue as I’ve always been a very ambitious person. I would store short-term goals in my memory, leave myself iPhone voice memo’s, calendar notes, reminders–pretty much everything electronic. But sometime in 2016 I got the idea to start writing things down and reacquainted myself with my own handwriting after reading somewhere about how goal achievement improved when writing things down.

Mark Murphy, for Forbes, states: Writing things down happens on two levels: external storage and encoding. External storage is easy to explain: you’re storing the information contained in your goal in a location (e.g. a piece of paper) that is very easy to access and review at any time. But there’s another deeper phenomenon happening: encoding. Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Writing improves that encoding process. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered (2018).

Actual 2017 agenda.

So, armed with this old-but-new approach for goal achievement, I searched the web for fun planners and agendas that I could carry with me anywhere. In 2016, I asked for an agenda for Christmas and used it the entire 2017.

What I accomplished was: paying off debts, a savings plan, student loan consolidation and more. The results were, a higher credit score, a top rated credit card, and saving the down payment and closing costs for my house! Me seeing my goals written down allowed me to keep track of what I had to do, be aware of what I didn’t do and gave me a sense of accomplishment once I was able to scratch that off my list.

Knowing that I had my business under control, I was able to go out and live it up with a clear conscious that I wasn’t neglecting anything by enjoying entertainment, relaxation or travel– as my grandfather would say, “life is for the living!”.

Convinced? Search for agendas and planners and start this process for yourself.